I found myself facedown on the floor in the bathroom of my tiny east-German apartment with my cheek pressed against the ***** tiles and it certainly wasn’t the first bathroom I’ve found myself facedown in but it was the furthest one from home and I turned over and watched moisture beads gel on the underside of the sink and when I stared hard enough one looked a little like an elephant and it was a bad joke but I laughed anyway because it was just moisture beads and the only elephant in the room was me.

Never the woman,
always the other woman.
She-poets have sung of it since
they first gave words
to the wet knot of their hearts.

The consolation prize, the late-comer
who must be the one to wash his
***** hands. Not a goddess but
the amazon who presses on his
body’s weakest points. The villainess.

The other woman has no power.
He doesn’t need to know her name,
her fears, which books made her cry as
a girl. He already has his golden idol,
but he wants a clay vessel on the side.

He doles her out careful smiles under
pinkblue bar-lights or in smoky kitchens.
He tells her yes you’re beautiful
but I’ve got a better one at home still
can I see the shape you make in my bed?

And she is hopeful and lost
but finds his arm and lets herself be led.
Never the woman, but a girl who
plays games in the mud, dirties her dress,
blacks out her face, her soiled lips.

And women speak of the other woman
like she is a crow above their doors.
Watching them make their love
through greedy eyes while
nursing her barbed and tangled heart.

For many reasons, December is a dead season.
The fields are painted in purple and grey, with
blackbirds rising into the sky from distant tree-lines.
The give of summer earth is a hazy memory now,
stored somewhere deep, frozen down in the pores of the soil
where seeds have drawn themselves tightly into themselves.
Trees bend to the ground under their own naked weight.

And this is the season of the christchild?
With a wind that seeks the softest curve of your neck,
slapping your face and drawing water from your eyes,
with nights that go on with only brief intermissions of day.
Is there comfort to be found in the darkest season,
hidden away in some corner of some wood or in a
box to be torn in the rush of Christmas morning?

Open a citrus fruit and let its oils blossom into the air.
Crush a pine needle and spread its syrup on your fingers.
Watch the yolk of the sun break over the horizon through
the smoke of your breath and the breath of the frozen earth.
Get up early, stay up late when the lights come on and walk
out under them. Feel the heat from the open doors of the
department stores but don’t enter; keep this for yourself.

Once, I drove through the predawn blues on the bank of the
Mohowk River the day before Christmas. In the timid dawn
the frost was lacework, birches bowed, the blackbirds jubilated.
And somewhere ahead, a pine wreath hung on a porch for me,
a door was unlocked, a bowl of citrus fruit was being laid out.
December is a dead season, a sleeping season, but from
the darkest night of the year hangs a simple string of lights.

It is getting colder: deeply, deeply.
November carries a fog as thick as guilt
to set heavily on my brow like a crown.

I piece recollections in a daylight mosaic,
bits of broken glass with ragged edges,
but the colors are dark, the faces unfinished.

A row of bruises on my leg has cropped up
overnight like small brown mushrooms,
I feel the tissue deaden beneath my skin.

The fog comes at dawn like a merciful nurse
to remove me from my own history. It presses
cottonballs against my eyes. The bruises remain.

The bar-lights remain, smudgy windows grinning
out from under their shrouds, dark streets, they
too remain, waiting like a trap under deadleaves.

But did I break myself on him like a bottle last last?
The fog says YOU DID YES YOU DID
and reflects to me the shame of my own face.

The loneliness and the shudder rise in my throat sometimes still.
Although I push them down into the ground like melt water,
some people are born under vicious stars.

November baby, your eyes the color of water holding light,
smelling of burning leaves in forests whose names neither
you nor I know. Now tell me, is this not a beautiful dream?

You are a king of the failing daylight, long shadows, the frozen ground,
turning our breath into crystals in the air that hang on your every word.
Two children of the winter, you its fearless rush and me, its limping end,

in like a lamb, March child: pale skinned and sparrow-hearted.
If there is a lion in me he is dead or hibernating under the ivory
vaults of my ribcage. But listen, inside a faint fluttering begins, a panic

or a voice rising timidly in song with the smoke from your fire.
The fabrics of our seasons weave together in this beautiful dream
where my moon is waxing always, rising in your frozen winter sky.

The root suggests multiples,
a pair of shoes, yours and mine.

The prefix is a verb in motion, a
positive direction; a triumph of gravity
in defiance of its equal and opposite reaction.

He stands by the car in the grey light
with drizzle beading up on his shoulders.
Our life upset, torn at the seam into his and mine.

Turn around,
the coward whispers from my mouth.
I see my face reflected in the glass window

staring back at myself, the coward,
half of a set now rendered unusable, sold as scrap.
Turn around.

Multiples reduced to singular nouns.
My shoes are kicked and left by the door.
Everywhere his shapes are cut out of the dust.

The coward in me grins wide as a sickle
In the bathroom mirror. Our set of ghosts are
making too much noise, all night they keep me

up.

Listen:

it’s 3AM and your heart feels like a gear
that slipped the track.
Or the sunshine smells like honeysuckle
and its the most perfect day of the year
but the knuckles of winter close on your throat.

This is not a new story. Some women can’t
find a good man.
The intellectuals, the homely homebound
finding nothing but silences, theirs and that of
God (or someone that goes by His name)

Anyway, He’s not on the other line,
your prayers spread like ripples,
skimming, only reaching the surface.
Some women are cursed by Eve and her
****** want to know, you know?

No. Eve was a ***** or a saint,
nothing more, not a woman with a real ribcage housing
a real blood heart. Some women can’t find a good man,
but she had two and chose neither and
that is her curse.

She found herself naked and embarrassed
and Adam was a fool with nothing to say
and she was embarrassed by him too.
When lo, the angel of God cursed her *****
from which she birthed ****** and cowardice.

Some women can’t find a good man
and nights seem like the barrens of Eden
with fruits that birth flies and rot on the vines.
Remember, sister, our mother who from out
of Adam was born then cursed to his side.